Lightroom workflow questions

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I am still a newbie with lightroom and am wondering which profiles you (gurus) use when importing.

 

If I do not click on any profile,Lightroom imports with contrast +25, and brightness +50 which tends to be wrong with most of my outdoor pictures (garanteed white sky), +5 black (sounds fine) and some non linear medium contrast curve. It also adds some default sharpening at 25 and chroma noise reduction around 25 (in the v1.0 at least).

 

I have found some M8 profiles for LR camera profiling options on the web but they just give me oversaturated greens, so I end up editing the profile moving the saturation sliders till the greens look ok.

 

In the end I just manually trying dozen of parameters per image and spending way too much time "in the darkroom". So does anyone has a any profiles or tricks they are using with quite some success ?

Typically I'd like something that get a decent look to outdoor midday blue sky landscapes that I could start with, spending less time fine tuning.

 

I tried using C1 and have an even harder time than with Lightroom, plus I really like the cropping tool in LR and the integration of library functions and easy corrections (as you guess my photoshoping skills are lacking even more).

 

I know I could try the in-camera jpegs as Jono suggested a while back but, I'd like to keep trying with DNG as I get results I like (but it takes me nights).

[chris_tribble]

The following basic settings work for me on import for general work (the 17 on Vibrance is a result of viewing Michael Reichman's LR tutorials - excellent value imho.

 

Brightness = 25,

ColorNoiseReduction = 25,

Contrast = 25,

Vibrance = 17,

WhiteBalance = "Auto",

 

If you know that the WB was spot on, then use "As shot".

 

Hope this helps - I'm happier daily with LR - in particular for BW...